••Al-Qaeda calls Obama a “House Negro”

Check out this video message from Al-Qaeda’s number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In it, he offers his analysis of the recent U.S. election as a public acknowledgment of the U.S. failure in Iraq. Then, he uses Malcolm X to call Obama a “house negro” (which was Malcolm’s “nice” way of saying “house nigger”).

It is interesting that Al-Qaeda has to do some PR work among their own constituency to curb any tendency of assigning too much optimistic significance to the election of Obama. So they subtley remind them he is pro-Israel (in the use of a photo) and suggest he is only doing the bidding of whites (in using Malcolm’s words). At the same time, they don’t quite assign ownership of America’s “legacy of failure and crimes” to him. This is a small glimpse into the ways these radicals understand race and its place in U.S. history.